Portal:Rhode Island/Selected article/9

H. P. Lovecraft (August 20, 1890–March 15, 1937) was an American author who achieved posthumous fame through his influential works of horror fiction. He was virtually unknown and published only in pulp magazines before he died in poverty, but he is now regarded as one of the most significant 20th-century authors in his genre. He was born in Providence, Rhode Island where he spent most of his life. Among his most celebrated tales are "The Call of Cthulhu" and "The Shadow over Innsmouth," both canonical to the Cthulhu Mythos. Lovecraft was never able to support himself from earnings as author and editor. He subsisted in progressively straitened circumstances in his last years; an inheritance was completely spent by the time that he died at age 46. According to Joyce Carol Oates, Lovecraft exerted "an incalculable influence on succeeding generations of writers of horror fiction." Stephen King called him "the twentieth century's greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale," and lists him as having the largest influence in his fiction writing.